While reading these chapters and listening to Hick’s retell her own experiences with literacy and telling those of Laurie’s, I found my self connected. I was connected by two things the mother daughter relationship that Hicks and her mother shared, and the home environment of Laurie. I was raised in a middle class family, my mother, a teacher, and my father a former CPA. My father was forced to early retirement after being severely injured and traumatized by a head on car crash with a drunk driver. He was never the same as my mother said. This happening merely a month before I was born, my family changed. My mother became the primary breadwinner on less than $1,000 a month. We were middle class in that both of them attended college and social expectations were high, but financially we were poor. “We lived between classes (p. 48).” Often we did without at home to protect our outer appearances. We often dressed the part, but at home life was totally different. And, I like hooks, coped through my imagination and connecting to books. I looked for bits of me in text and allowed that to escape the conflict in my life. My head lived in the book and when I wasn’t reading I was living in an imaginary world like Laurie and Hicks. I lived for the future, imagining stories of romance and my role in the world. I cling tightly to The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett. Those were literacy experiences for me, and for many girls I teach. Although I wasn’t orphaned like Mary Lennox, I often felt abandoned like her. I was disconnected in society by what I was and what I had to portray at school. I played in the woods creating my own special place with imaginary friends while in the background yelling and curses filled the air in the distance. My father depressed and broken, and my mother trying to hold him and us together. As Boler wrote “emotions are inseperable from action and relations, from lived experience.” The emotions for Laurie developed into a medical disorder, but for me it became anxiety and depression. These chapters taught me a lot about myself and what I see in my students. All to often these things are presented to teachers as something that the child has to deal with, but we neglect the fact that there is a cause a seed that causes these struggles for students. Understanding once again is half the battle. Through literary text and writing Laurie attempts to understand herself and her role in society. As teachers it is important to be aware of the impact of writing and reading in our students lives, and to raise questions about roles and norms. In journals and in other outlets, teachers must help support girls to recognize “which kinds of fictions will be safe to write, voice, and live in school.” We also must recognize how we carry with us our on hybrid identity in which we interpret the world around us. For our students we have to acknowledge that in their own literacy experiences and provide opportunities for them to connect.
Amy Hardister